Home for all technology and products -- news, features and interviews of top-notch enterprises in India. This portal covers all the major happenings across verticals including telecom, mobility, gadgets & gizmo, retail, services, BFSI, energy, manufacturing, SMBs, business technologies, GreenIT, outsourcing...

Monday, August 28, 2017

A Microsoft-Zinnov
study has revealed that the Hybrid Cloud market in India is fast
becoming a new standard for delivery of digital transformation. With the
substantial cost as well as organizational benefits, Indian enterprises are
increasingly intensifying their reliance on a hybrid cloud setup.

The report observed
that hybrid cloud deployment at a steady rate could result in cost savings of
anywhere between 5% and 30% for an enterprise (depending on the growth
of virtual machines in an enterprise’s data centre and a proportion of
workloads moving from private data centre to public cloud infrastructure),
based on the output of its proprietary cost modeller. As per the
modeller, the hybrid cloud solution offered by Microsoft Azure is the
most economical.

As per the survey
conducted as part of this study, over 40 percent of enterprises have planned or
are planning to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure or transform their existing
IT infrastructure. The primary reasons cited for
adopting hybrid cloud solutions include, lowering total cost of ownership (54
percent), facilitating innovation (42 percent), enhancing
operational efficiencies (42 percent), and enabling companies to respond
to and meet customer expectations more readily (40 percent).

Highlighting the need
for hybrid cloud, Meetul Patel, General Manager, Marketing &
Operations, Microsoft said, “Many organizations have existing
investments in IT infrastructure and business-specific needs to keep parts of
it on their own premises. At the same time, the cloud presents an incredible
opportunity to improve RoI, develop innovative solutions, and respond rapidly
to changing business demands. The hybrid model is a ‘best of all
worlds’ option that allows customers to benefit from the cloud on
their own terms”.

According to Pari
Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov, “Hybrid cloud is becoming the preferred
deployment model across sectors. Industries where the impact of digital
transformation is the highest are the ones that are adopting hybrid cloud at an
accelerated pace. However, enterprises need to select a hybrid cloud providerthat can provide them with the right
migration tools to enable seamless relocation of existing services - between
dedicated private cloud and public cloud infrastructures - without lengthy
or unplanned disruption to live service.”

According to the
report, adopting a hybrid cloud model requires transformational change in the
way companies interact with their IT and business. There is a need to enable
employees with competence in contract management, as hybrid cloud deployment
models involve interaction with third party cloud providers. Members within the
organization need to be skilled to handle any exigency involving the cloud
service provider. Therefore, training is needed to facilitate employees within
the organization to familiarize themselves with the new business processes and
governance structures, said the study.

Zinnov
analysed more than 50
global cloud channel partners and found that hybrid cloud deployments
constituted 45-50% of their overall cloud business. These channel partners are
distributed across large-tier IT service providers, mid-tier IT service
providers, Hosters and Telcos, Digital Marketing, and Platform BPO companies.

The growth of the
cloud industry has been spurred by the funding and investments in cloud tech startups,
which have increased exponentially. In 2016, the cloud market saw an estimated
370+ deals with the average investments growing at CAGR 15% between 2012-2016.
The hybrid cloud deals accounted for 45-50% of the total cloud deals that
happened from 2012 to 2016, and these primarily focused on storage, automation
as well as hybrid cloud management solutions.

In addition, there has
also been an increase in the cloud-specific acquisitions, growing at 35% CAGR
from 2012 to 2016 with an average investment jump of 81.25%. In 2016 alone,
there have been 115 cloud-specific acquisitions with the likes of CenturyLink
shelling out US$34 billion for Level 3 Communication, a provider of Data
Center Connectivity and Cloud.

Rapid growth in
internet adoption – fueled by government initiatives like demonetization and
GST, growth of mobile data (the number of mobile developers is estimated to
double from the current 300,000 by 2020), and digital transformation, led by
the emergence of disruptive start-ups, especially in areas such as fintech,
e-commerce, SaaS, are stated to be the key reasons for this development.